


Feral

by MMXIII



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: (far too many), (sort of), Drug Use, Gen, General insanity, M/M, Murder Husbands, Poetry, Psychopaths In Love, adjectives, criminal boyfriends, mormor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-20 05:26:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MMXIII/pseuds/MMXIII
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Insanity is quite methodical really; the levee breaks in the storm, and the tide rolls in.<br/>A series of fractured, blood-spattered vignettes</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Facilis descensus averno

I

Insanity is quite methodical really; the levee breaks in the storm, and the tide rolls in.

Each ill-placed, ill-defended crystalline skyscraper falls, sending tremors through the stock market and up through the soles of Sebastian's [filthy] feet.  
Something clinks obscenely in his pocket. 'Dickhead' he groans, his fingers brushing something cold and smooth, rectangular. [Jim’s dominoes are hand-carved from the bleached bones of the Mexican drug cartels] This is Jim's exhilarating, stealth destroying take on omnipresence.

Sebastian leaves Jim alone on Tuesday; he notices a string of [inexpertly] flayed metacarpals around his right wrist.  
The oscillation between hysteria and reptilian stasis becomes increasingly pronounced The insomnia is brutal.

II

Jim sits in a car park in Dublin at 3am, unscrewing the tiny blades from a pallid fist full of primary-coloured plastic pencil sharpeners. He giggles at the incongruity, of course he does. He lays the little shards of metal in a puddle by his [coiled] left foot one by one. _Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C…’_ he croons to the part of himself that bites his own hands.  
The giddy, glittery plastic casings he casts across the oily, sweat-infused tarmac like bones.

He doesn't mean to but he smiles.  
His storm is coming.

III

Sebastian comes back like he always does, skulks around the perimeter and frowns; the ceiling is covered in [equidistantly spaced] drawing pins from which hang suspended the black cracking bodies of hundreds of [individually lured] insects.  
He nudges the peeling carpet with his foot, eyeing the sprawling insanity that is usually so enigmatically concealed

Jim lies on his back, murmuring in tongues, all derivatives, squares, roots, cosines  
His fingers twitch as he draws the thoughts back in like ink rising out of water  
Both eyes are open though chronically dilated in the dusty half light

 _did you know...’_  
[questions taste wrong, Moriarty is a kingdom of heady assertions] ‘...that Heroin is exceptionally benign, chemically speaking’

Sebastian circles warily

 _You are exceptionally malign, chemically speaking_  
 _And yet here you are_  
 _Hmmm…_ Sebastian sits down letting his matted hair brush against the grotesquely buckling 70s mould-ridden wallpaper  
He thinks he sees little James’ earnest handwriting on the paint underneath  
He definitely doesn't see it on the underside of all of the floorboards, behind the skirting board, between the radiator pipes, on top of the picture rail,  
 _Inside the socket covers…_  
 _Creepy bastard_ Sebastian murmurs  
Jim hiccups and toes Sebastian’s knee [aimlessly]

And Sebastian is afraid

IV

When experiencing optimum levels of lucidity

Jim [ab]uses maths like dialysis  
Subjective affectations draw his mind away from the black stasis of staying alive  
But he adores his self-orchestrated transfusions of objectivity  
Sebastian enjoys the lull of recalibration. Both men sit in separate rooms disassembling their second most dangerous assets; Sebastian fondles his .44 calibres, Jim repaves the winding avenues of his cerebral empire.

 _The Executive and the Executioner_  
It looks neat on the pseudo-business cards that Jim leaves in Sebastian’s pockets with little notes scrawled on the reverse, his chosen forum for referring to himself in the third person.

_Jim emphatically loathes your awful haircut, darling x_

V

Jim sits facing due East with his back against a plate glass window surrounded by a semi-circle of foreign dictionaries.  
English to Kazak, Kazak to French, French to Mandarin to Russian to Catalan. One language is insufficient for his Old Testament scope of expression.  
He’s waiting for the sun to go down  
At the edge of town  
So he can watch his shadow implode, softly crawling away from him as he draws himself back inside the vaulted cavern of his ribcage. He finds it calming to indulge in the ostentatious ritual of visual self-possession. It reminds him tangentially of the times when Sebastian smokes inside and Jim steals his nicotine- soothed exhalations [and much more besides] before they can taint the pH of the air. Sebastian loves the caustic lining of James’ lungs, his skull, his coronary system.  
All betray the madness of the man by a sickly chemical sheen.

VI

Genius craves an audience  
And talent requires an application

That’s what keeps the vertebrae of their spines locked together in a death roll of cerebral brutality and blood-soaked adoration  
[Horrifyingly] unified, they lie in wait without fear, justice, or adequately armed opposition

If Sebastian were to die [unexpectedly], James would keep the bones from his hands. Now and again he’d roll them between his thumb and index finger languidly murmuring curled obscenities in countless tongues like deviant hail marys; Sebastian has no delusions of grandeur, he wouldn't want it [need it] any other way.

VII

 _James, wha-_  
 _shhh, quiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiet…_  
Jim stands behind Sebastian, who sits on the fire escape chain-smoking, because he fucking can, teasing Sebastian’s bloody blonde hair apart with his manicured hands.  
They both sigh, heavily; Sebastian’s head thuds against 90s breezeblock, Jim bares his throat to his beloved/loathed city. It’s a gesture they’ve inherited from each other, like gloriously elegant ravening wolves conceding the presence of something else whose darkness excites and enraptures their own.  
Display the jugular; sharpen the knives. [Sebastian sharpens the knives; he knows what they taste like before [and after] they’ve been used]  
Self preservation really has nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.

_I see the curvature of the earth…_

Sebastian nudges his head back further to see Jim looking down at the mercury laced horizon with something akin to disdain.

_...and I want to make it flat_

Sebastian exhales softly as Jim splays his palm out across his skull to illustrate the concluding adjective in a silent demonstration of the ways in which Sebastian’s brain is a microcosm of London.

After a moment Jim withdraws his hand, examines his fingers, touches them to his tongue, smirks.  
 _You smell like murder most foul, Sebastian_  
 _must've been one of yours then_  
 _hmmm. Elegant and messy?_ the Irish lilt is black, playful, delirious.  
 _delightful and obscene_  Sebastian confirms

Jim smiles drunkly as he tastes the crusting reddish tracery behind Sebastian's ear


	2. Ordo ab chao

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More general insanity with fuzzy, blood flecked edging ;)

VIII

Jim’s got a small photo, curled at the corners, in the right hand inside pocket of his favourite sports jacket [behind the driving license that gives his name as James Hawkins, the one that makes him giggle because he is rather a pirate after all]. It’s of a young officer in black military fatigues, grinning a tad too sadistically among the shy half-smiles of his brothers-in-arms. With his filthy blonde hair he looks like Milton’s Satan, arrogant, defiant, hedonistic; a broken visionary, an angel from hell. He’s 3 counts of fractured knuckles waiting to happen, the beginnings of a more detached, much more intriguing career specialisation. 

The next time Jim reaches for his whitegold-plated lighter, his fingers catch the paper and register the presence of something that feels like fluid Braille. Turning the photo over in one hand whilst lighting up the central pillars of a warehouse with the other, Jim sees the cause of the fluid indentation: ‘gotcha, J’ he reads, in Sebastian’s precise, angular hand.

IX

‘I swear to every god you’ll never fucking believe in-‘  
Sebastian snarls, but doesn’t thrash, he’s been trained to observe.  
Jim grins, with his little pearlescent teeth embedded in Sebastian’s right hand, looking up through red eyelashes drunkenly, pupils blown wide like black Siberian lakes. He touches his tongue to Sebastian’s burning skin. ‘Steel’ he murmurs, breath soothing the shifting dunes of Sebastian’s scarred knuckles, ‘lighter fluid’, ‘whisky’, he draws a soft line along the most ticklish part of Sebastian’s forearm with the tip of his nose, ‘blood’, ‘sweat’… ‘chanel no. 5?’ they both laugh like demented school boys.  
He pauses to nuzzle Sebastian’s jugular and exhales languidly. ‘Me’ he croons with satisfaction as Sebastian’s pulse jack-knifes under his forked tongue.

Later, while his hand throbs sweetly, Sebastian smirks at the teeth marks that so neatly encircle his only ostentatiously visible tattoo; ‘noli me tangere’.

 

X

Sebastian’s creeping around corners, shotgun off safety, heart beat [psychopathically] steady. He’s wading through a foot of water in an Edwardian townhouse in central London. The traitorous ripples like hairline fractures have made his movements impossible to conceal; Jim doesn't just listen with his ears.

He sees James, in a crisp ivory cotton shirt, leaning against the sink, palms played on either side, shoulders taught, spine bowed.  
Water cascades over the edge of both the sink and the bath, hammering into Jim’s little ocean of anguish covering the floor.

‘James, where are you?’ Sebastian breathes into the back of Jim’s neck as he slides safety on and tucks his gun into the back of his trousers.  
‘Я не знаю’  
Sebastian closes the gap between them; Russian is recoverable  
‘Волко́в боя́ться — в лес не тходи́ь’ Sebastian reaches around to Jim’s white hands and laces their fingers together.

Then he drives his nails into the fleshy gaps between Jim’s delicate talons  
There’s a shudder just as he feels one crazed cerebral network come back online, black mercury neurons aligning milliseconds before Jim’s head snaps up.

‘proverbs, Sebastian?’ says the sharp velveteen voice, pooling with A negative.  
‘you love proverbs’ Sebastian says defiantly 

‘За чем пойдёшь, то и найдёшь’ Jim giggles, before Sebastian finds himself underwater.

Which is fine really,  
Until he realises he can taste both bleach,  
And blood

XI

Sebastian’s re-calibrations take a different [more visceral] shape  
He lays down his rifle, rolls up his sleeves, unlaces his boots & sharpens his teeth.  
He takes up the fight that lost him the war.  
Burning like a heathen and rising like a fucking phoenix; each shattered bone, torn ligament, blood-bubbling laceration soothes the raging storm in his head.

Every so often he chases a fight he knows he won’t win [just for the high he gets when the warm trickle of spattered blood dripping from his nose slides over his top lip and pools on his tongue]; you can’t see the bloodshot whites of someone’s eyes through the scope of a rifle.

Dislocated shoulder [black, blue, pink & yellow]  
Head trauma  
Multiple lacerations to hands and forearms

[he's not so very far away from tibial shaft fractures and collapsed lungs, but then, that is why he does it]

Hairline fractures, so many hairline fractures  
[a bone bows agonisingly the second before it snaps]

Sebastian wrenches his shoulder back in himself which a sickeningly lovely crunch  
And it’s so horrendously bruised  
The colours of a deep space nebula, Jim muses

The colours of advanced decomposition

He wants to press his fingers into the damage, but Sebastian has a headache, he's massaging his abused skull with [broken] fingers, a wayfaring temper, and a right-hook like a juggernaut. No matter, it'll take weeks for the glorious blood-rainbow to recede

And Sebastian himself is very forgiving,  
certainly more so than his flesh

XII

They’re in DC on business  
And everything Jim’s wearing smells [tastes] Italian, everything except the little enamel rabbit tie pin. Bleached bone white with a faceted [Myxomatosis] ruby eye, bespoke, London.  
‘Follow me, Alice’ Jim giggles turning to melt away  
Sebastian rolls his eyes as Jim [flirtatiously] lights a Cuban cigar and holds it out behind him. ‘We’re both going to hell’ Sebastian laughs, smoke pouring from his nose and mouth as he falls into step on Jim’s right, like always. 

‘Casar na daoiní ar a chéile, ach ní chastar na cnuic’ says Jim, seemingly distracted.  
Irish is for retrospection [for poetry], which is always a dangerous thing; there are some things that just aren’t possible

XIII

A smear of blood, a crusting stripe, at shoulder height over the stark white wall, 3 metres long with a strangled handprint at each end. Sebastian catalogues quickly [blood is eloquent]  
and rolls his eyes; James is such a fucking drama queen.

‘I’m going to pull your spine out through your mouth  
Crucify you to the ceiling and  
Bathe me feet in your blood’ comes the singsong voice from further down the hall  
‘Terrifying’ says Sebastian mildly, [he’s got 7 knives secreted upon his person, he can take it], as he removes his shoes and strides towards 10 hours of Bach’s Secular Cantatas.

XIV

‘He’s dead Sebastian, [like smoke], it doesn’t matter’  
He says this because Sebastian looks tired with his father’s jaw and his mother’s soft blue eyes holding an old hunting rifle  
[one of a set, probably from a large estate, frantically sold and dispersed to ease maintenance costs after the family dissipated… ah]

‘Men fall, only thoughts are immortal, Sebastian, a flicker of cognition outlasts all the empires of the world’  
‘and yours, James?’ Sebastian looks up, grinning boyishly  
A name can jack a pulse and cripple a country like nothing else, they both know that

Sebastian half smiles remembering his backward-thinking father  
Then he looks at James, volatile, hilarious, sadistic, facilitating  
Walking on water with a halo of fluorescent lights  
[scriptures of digitized blood] 

‘My God’s a reasonable man’   
Jim loves that, he burns down the Moran family estate for the both of them

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> noli me tangere - don't touch me
> 
> Я не знаю - I don't know
> 
> proverbs:  
> Волко́в боя́ться — в лес не тходи́ь - If you don't like wolves, don't go into the forest  
> За чем пойдёшь, то и найдёшь - what you go looking for, you'll find  
> Casar na daoiní ar a chéile, ach ní chastar na cnuic (Irish) - Men meet, mountains do not
> 
> Thank you for reading, its been my pleasure ^^


	3. Pulvis et umbra sumus

XV

Jim sits at his desk in his oak panelled office deftly forcing arrhythmia on a drawer full of watches with a variety of ostentatiously cruel-looking implements. He looks up as Shadow flits past the open door.  
‘I think you were scared’ he murmurs  
‘fuck off’ Sebastian groans from down the hall in resignation  
‘I saw your hand shaking, Moran’ This is one of Jim’s favourite games; Sebastian is a very proud man  
There’s a muffled growl and then a series of dull, damp [punchbag] thuds. Jim doesn’t move, just bathes in the sound of Sebastian’s enraged rightrightlefts and the strangled clicking of broken watches. He can hear the pipes expandingcontracting, the high frequency scream of all the electrics, his own improbable heartbeat bubbling in his ears. 

He is perfectly still  
And Sebastian is so vital

XVI

Sebastian hears three shots,  
[lung]  
[shoulder]  
[arm]  
‘Amateur’ he hacks, bloody saliva bubbles in his mouth, spattering obscenely on the ground as he spits  
out  
the

4 seconds later he can’t stand  
[all the king’s horses]  
2 more and he can’t breathe  
[and all the king’s men]  
He sees black stars and white lights [dilated pupils &childhood shoebox cameras]  
He’s drowning, drowning in his own blackened blood seeping around his blonde hair like a halo, shuddering, clawing away from inert muscle and shattered bone.

His left lung collapses like a torn canvas on a sailboat  
[James always sails too close to the…]

Cardiac arrest

XVII

Jim thinks Sebastian looks glorious [because he’s seen him both better and worse]  
With his claws wrapped in silk in the ICU  
That’s interesting [why is it interesting?]  
Jim smiles, slides a gun under Sebastian’s 3 standard issue pillows [wrinkling his nose at the cheap crackles] inhales deeply, nose brushing [now curling] blonde hair.

Sebastian smells fantastic, rain, smoke, acid, iron, defiance, violence, morphine  
His lacerated hands are uncharacteristically relaxed, the right one, skin still raised, bearing an unauthorised fledgling symbol of Jim’s omniscience; a little black magpie whose mannerisms imitate Jim’s as the bones shift underneath.

‘fuck’ Sebastian says fondly, several weeks later  
‘oh do shut up, Moran’


	4. Sunt superis sua iura

**XVIII**

 Jim breathes in; London breathes out

_Black Thames run swiftly, I can’t feel my tongue_

Cities are always rising and falling

Always rising

                Always-

 

‘Christ what’s happened _now_ ’ says Sebastian, mouth tearing into a grin

 

 

‘It’s happening in five’, says Jim

_Rome was destroyed_

 ‘четыре’

_Greece was destroyed_

‘trois’

_Persia was destroyed_

 ‘dói’

 

 _Oh my god_ , says Sebastian

As Jim runs his hands over the spine of the city

 _Metamorphoses, book fifteen_ , says Jim, eyes bright, _let's see what's left when **I'm** done._

 

 

 

**[ _Sir- sir I think you’ll want to see this- yes I know, but-yes. Sir it's Him_ ]**

_Let's play a game__

 

 

**XIX**

Sebastian wakes with Jim’s laptop cable draped over his ankle

                             With Jim’s arm across his back

                             With Jim’s blood staining the underside of his closely-cut fingernails

                             With Jim’s teeth to his ear

                                     Jim’s hand on the back of his neck

                                     Jim’s voice sliding between his vertebrae

Sebastian wakes _**shaking**_ with adrenaline

_Just imagine the world on its knees_

_Just one push and over it goes, Sebastian, I could do it right this-_

                                                                [And something else]

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you!  
> Comments would be much appreciated ^^


End file.
